Anthropocene Book of the Dead

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

I live in Seattle now.
I consider myself a New Yorker despite not having lived there since right
after 9/11 (it’s been a long, strange trip).
And my family farm is in Iowa.

As a kid I spent weeks there every summer, peeling potatoes,
hanging up laundry, picking beans, making pickles, husking corn, going fishing,
“helping” Grandpa Channer milk the cows, exploring in the pasture beyond the
apple orchard, and taking minute inventory of the astounding variety of insect
life.

I was a mini-biologist back then, and the farm was paradise
for someone so inclined. Everywhere,
there were insects. If you couldn’t see
them you could hear them, thrumming and whirring and scratching as they went
about their business. Bees crowded the
garden, all industry and drive amongst the peonies and bachelor’s button. Palm-sized garden spiders hung in wait in the
long grass at the far side of the driveway, midriffs bright with orange and
scarlet coats of arms. An almost
infinite variety of beetles were everywhere to discover – huge ferocious stag
beetles, pretty ladybirds, longhorns, and loud, startling click beetles.

There were giant walking sticks and waterbugs to catch and
release – katydids and praying mantises to observe – wasps to fear as they
buzzed protectively about their immense, bulging nests – fireflies to catch and
imprison in Mason jars – and giant red velvet mites astonishing in their tiny
perfection.

Clouds of gnats hovered in the cool under the oak trees at
the bottom of the lawn, and at the stone quarry in Chickasaw Park there were
traffic jams of dragonflies – bright blue skimmers, heavy cruising darning
needles, emeralds and petaltails. In
August, any tiny patch of moisture on bare ground attracted cabbage moths,
yellow and white, fluttering delicately as they sipped and looking in their
numbers as if, when they flew off, they could hoist the Earth with them.

And now? Now, there
isn’t nothing, but there’s not much left.
The full-throated chorus of droning, humming, throbbing insect song is a
barely-heard ghost in the distance. A
handful of gnats bother late porch-sitters if the screen door isn’t
closed. The garden spiders are a greatly
reduced army, and they are all much, much smaller than before. A Monarch butterfly in the garden is cause
for exclamation, and farmers are importing bees from Australia.

A recent study published in Science and led by UCL, Stanford
and UCSB found that invertebrate numbers have decreased by 45% on average over
the last 40 years.

I can see the decline when I visit the farm each
August. I can hear the silence where
once there was an omnipresent roar. But
I had no idea how drastic the change was – and when I saw it quantified, I was
astonished.

You might ask, “So what?
I don’t like spiders. Gnats are
nasty and annoying, and butterflies are pretty, but who needs them?”

According to the study,

This decline matters because of the enormous benefits
invertebrates such as insects, spiders, crustaceans, slugs and worms bring to
our day-to-day lives, including pollination and pest control for crops,
decomposition for nutrient cycling, water filtration and human health.

And Dr. Ben Collen, last author of the study, said,

We were shocked to find similar losses in invertebrates as
with larger animals, as we previously thought invertebrates to be more
resilient. While we don’t fully understand what the long-term impact of these
declining numbers will be, currently we are in the potentially dangerous
position of losing integral parts of ecosystems without knowing what roles they
play within it.

And yes, climate change.

It’s not the only reason, of course, that insect populations
are in decline. We don’t know what’s
happening with the honey bees yet. In
Iowa I suspect that factory farming, so reliant on chemicals, is killing off
populations of any number of species.
And monoculture agriculture can’t be conducive to biological diversity,
even where insects aren’t bug-bombed into oblivion.

But climate change isn’t helping. Sure, a species here or there is able to
expand its range – but that comes at the expense of other, neighboring species,
on whom it must encroach.

Most concerning, I think, is that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE’RE
DOING. We don’t know what’s out
there. We don’t know precisely how these
complex ecosystems work. We don’t know
which species can die off with no human repercussions, and which are lynchpins
on which our very survival might depend.
We suspect – we think we know – we study feverishly, attempting to limn
the outlines of the story before the players change – but we don’t know. Not for certain. Not enough.

The issue is not that we act as though insects are pests to
be gotten rid of. The issue is that we
are heedless in every way. Our
lumbering, careless, devouring predation and annihilation of ecosystem after
ecosystem does not strike us – or at least not many of us – as the amoral
violence that it is. We’re rushing
toward the future and we think it’s bright.
We think of planetary prosperity and food for everyone, a never-ending
upward rise and expansion, a glorious future of technology and pleasure.

The minatory finger of evidence, however, points in the
exactly contrary direction. The insects
are telling the real story.

Capra pyrenaica
pyrenaica, its lyrical species name, is lovely and lilting to say - as is its Spanish common name, 'bucardo.' And the beasts themselves were magnificent, with thick, ridged horns in elegant
back-swept curves and a long, graceful muzzle.

They lived in the Iberian Peninsula - most commonly in the Cantabrian Mountains, Southern France, and the northern Pyrenees.

We hunted them to death over the course of about 200
years. Celia, the last member of her
species, was killed by a falling tree and found dead on January 6, 2000.

In a typically modern and Frankenstein-esque twist, in
2003 scientists cloned a Pyrenean ibex.
While the cloning process was “successful,” inasmuch as a clone survived
for 10 minutes after being delivered by its surrogate mother, there are still
no Pyrenean ibex left alive.

Beast by beast, final death by final death, we are making
the world a smaller, poorer place.

Friday, July 24, 2015

So what exactly have we killed? What havoc have we wrought? What
damage have we done that cannot be undone? What has the Anthropocene meant to
our fellow travelers – the animals we’ve driven to the brink (or over the edge
of) extinction, the ecosystems we’ve destroyed or rendered unrecognizable, and
the communities, traditions, and ways of human life that have been cut down by
the scythe of progress?

This blog is my small attempt to tell some of the stories of
the creatures and things we have lost.
Already it’s proving difficult.

I’ve
started researching. I’ve begun looking up the names of the dead that were
written down, and finding that not only are they gone, but for many the trail is
already going cold. A stub of a Wiki
entry here, a short paper from the 1930s there, a mention in popular culture.
There’s so much we’ll never know about what we’ve devastated.

As for what cannot be researched – the countless extinct beetles,
nematodes, and fungi… the myriad ruined vernal ponds and drained wetlands… the clear-cut
mountaintops that once were islands of stupendous diversity… the close-knit bands
of nomads who walked out of what remained of the forest and into annihilation… the long lost tribes
of folk with ancient, unique stories, their songs now silent – all those things
brutally blotted out on our 8,000 year long path of destruction and not
recorded? Most will surely remain nameless forever.

Why is it important? I’m not sure yet. Perhaps this is an
attempt at atonement. Perhaps it’s an exercise in silly mawkishness. Maybe it’s
something else.

I want it to be interesting and science-y and full of intriguing bits and bobs about the amazing forms life takes, and has taken, on this planet. I want it to make you holler, "How could we do that?!"

But I also want it to be a tone poem, and a history. A bearing of
witness, and a warning. A shot across the bow to those in power who still
believe they can pretend that nothing is happening, and that they will not be
held accountable.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll start with the story of the last
thylacine. It’s better known than most, easy to research, and there’s a recent
viral internet hook to get me started. Please stay tuned – and let me know in
the comments if you think I am off the mark.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

The tarpan. The
thylacine. The stout legged wren and the North Island snipe.

The Carpathian wisent and the sea mink. The Danish clouded Apollo butterfly.

The Chatham bellbird.
The upland moa. The crested shell
duck.

The polydamas swallowtail and the aurochs.

The Cebu warty pig.

The bushwren, the dusky seaside sparrow, and the Xerxes
blue.

The quagga, and the Pyrenean Ibex.

The litany of their names is a kind of bitter poem.
These and thousands more of our fellow creatures are
gone.

The Center for Biological Diversity reports that in the past 500 years, approximately 1,000 species have gone
extinct as a direct result of human activity.
It’s of note that this number does not – it cannot – include those
species that disappeared before science was able to discover and name them.

Through habitat loss, by over-hunting and over-fishing, by
poisoning and poaching, we’ve increased the current extinction rate to up to
1,000 times than it would be without us.

We have wiped out species that teemed by their millions like
the passenger pigeon. We have destroyed
populations that were small, and special, and specialized, by erasing their
homes. We have lusted after furs and
feathers and used them indiscriminately for our personal adornment until the
lovely creatures that were sacrificed for our vanity are gone.

We have greedily devoured animals that we found tasty,
without even a passing thought that a wiser course might have been to conserve
some for a future feast. We have
poisoned wetlands and rivers and streams, causing untold numbers of
deaths. We have marched across the
landscape like behemoths, building our mills and mines and factories, laying
our endless miles of road, destroying the perfection of the upland prairie to
install monoculture crops that deplete the soil and provide no home or respite
for the native birds that used to nest there.

The death toll is stunning.
The loss is almost unbearable.
Our heedless avarice and blind cupidity has swept them all away – and every
day our plunder and pillage of what is left of the wild is
wiping more species off the face of the Earth.

This blog will seek to memorialize those creatures in some
small way, by telling just a bit of what is known about their stories.